ABSTRACT
Despite a growth in research, coaching resources and materials, an in-depth understanding of coaching and a conceptual underpinning with which to inform coaches’ practice remains elusive – to address this and to develop the conceptual framework we need to do more than consider coaching practice in an overly systematic and unproblematic way. Currently, the nature of coaching practice is often taken for granted and assumed, but in reality is ill-defined and under-theorised. Hence, we need to take both a critical and a reflexive stance towards coaching practice; in undertaking this task theory provides the necessary and useful ‘thinking tools’. Coaching practice, in the sense of the operationalisation of the coaching process through the micro-management of the coaching intervention, i.e. ‘what the coach is doing’ is considered in detail in Chapter 7. Instead, the purpose of this chapter is to examine theory-practice relations more closely to develop a more sophisticated (and intellectual) understanding of coaching practice – the chapter still considers practice from the perspective of coach intervention, but goes beyond the obvious and descriptive through unpacking the assumptions and beliefs that inform ‘what the coach is doing’.
